got the friggin' tools. yes they made my work more accurate. but i felt like a monkey in class. i know that doesn't make any sense, i was just carrying out the assignments before, but the sensation was still drawing, not circus animal training. the knowledge, i'll get the knowledge, it will all be worth it...
well, good one to have. basically, big projects (one unique thing, or few big unique things) or mass-distribution (limited or unlimited editions) - yeah, this keeps coming up, sometimes there's a way to make it both, is that always the case?
anyway, chess feels on the big side, more location hunting this evening, found two strong candidates, both at pier 84.
plus. occured to me late this morning, hey i can use the t-square with the straight edge - and also just do freehand drawing - either/both in class or outside of class. there are a lot more than three and a half hours in a week, a month, a year, a decade - this is ten classes, seven to go, probably best to do things teacher's way then, my way outside.
the other, was thinking "hey if you want straight lines, why wouldn't you do it on a computer?"
you would.
my perspective drawing class teacher thinks we should use tools and do things as precisely as possible. personally i just want to understand the concepts. if you want a straight line, wouldn't you use a computer? but i might bite the bullet and buy a t-square and a straight-edge and a triangle before next class. there are things i'm probably not quite getting. but it got me excited, to challenge myself, to stay man pre-machine. there is a reasonably large emotional distance between us, that would be reduced (if i weren't resentful of course). and my work won't look like the dog did it compared to the rest of the class. so those gulfs would be lessened. but what about the distance between your potential and what you're achieving right now? only two classes in, really, he didn't want us drawing the first one, my lines feel straighter, no practice, so that's maybe five or six hours of work, and i'm getting it. if i resort to pushpins and stainless steel rulers, i'll feel like - i'm not drawing. it would feel like making a model, i think.
maybe the question in this case (education not artmaking) is "how will i learn more?" by doing what teacher says and teacher wants and following teacher's methods? or saying "no, i didn't sign up for this class to become a tool-wielder, i want to understand the theory and just make my freehand drawing better, if i'm using a paper napkin at the airport and want to sketch something quickly, what good will that tool-mastery do me?"
mysterious indeed are the ways of john. and mysterious indeed are the outputs of flash.
oh, maybe if you understand what you're doing - no, i think for everyone, it's a surprise, any programming at all, just a few lines of code and you miss something completely obvious. a way of life for a lot of people i guess.
back in the day, i never would have asked for help. today, i believe that there are people who love doing this. and i'm doing what i can, right? to contribute? am i? to the world and the borg and society and friends and neighbors and the history of art? i don't know what else i can do, than keep pushing on, trying to envision and birth ever-more-ambitious works. take that as your starting point, and it becomes obvious, better get used to asking more and more people for help.
is there shame in it? am i lazy for not wanting to be mr. super-duper actionscript master? i don't think so. it really surprised me when i learned about studios back in the day, about painters delegating large swaths of their paintings to apprentices. now i look at any enterprise and that's how the big, successful ones seem to function. you have a movie director or producer, whoever you want to say calls the shots, let's stick to director because those are the people i care about, and then it's all figuring out how to persuade other people to get that movie out of your head and into the world, where it is sucked in by a potentially infinite number of heads (until we become the borg).
so, some mysteries, it's nice to know a pro you can say "i don't get it" and they might help you. some mysteries you want to face alone maybe. frankly i can't think of any right now. exploring mysteries is huge right? what we all can do, what our species has done, basically - look at it, not comprehend it, figure it out, uh oh, all of a sudden yeah we're into pandora's box? frankly this is simple, compared to what i'm talking about. a joke.
let's see if i still feel like this in a couple days. right now i'm saying "this is simple" and "i made a few beginner errors" and "with minimal guidance or web-tutorial hunting by friday this should be doing everything i want it to, programming phase of chess project will be complete." at the moment, the mystery seems more like "where exactly is this door sticking?" and it's just a matter of raising the hinges or sanding down the bottom or the floor or whatever - still work, but not profound, right? just work.
when is a cone not a cone? let's say you look at it from above. those traffic cones would look like squares, basically, with circles in the middle.
when do you feel like a pawn? probably if it's your first time ever on a giant chessboard, human-scale, you'd feel like that.
either way, you'd encounter something which is never directly beneath you in everyday walking-around life.
those are two of the artmini ideas which i want to try, and hopefully it will become obvious that i should pursue one of them and not the other.
right now, i'm leaning towards the cone.
current state of my artmini piece (keep changing mind about what i want to do, but at least now i have the capability to start trying things out and see what they look like instead of just imagining):
and saw this drive which has a display, speculated that the existence of such a device might help the kisokaido piece be light and portable and achievable, if use small digital camera with stills or short video clips and then upload say five gigs worth of memory cards each night:
not that i'm committing to using a tiny camera, but certainly a feasible approach. and glad the possibility exists.
speaking of small, light cameras, also got a waterproof case for it.
